Star Wars: The Old Republic has “19 major worlds,” built to “last for decades”

Senior creative director James Ohlen has been speaking at Comic-Con about the enormous scale of The Old Republic. The conference, reported by Darth Hater and picked up by Eurogamer, revealed that players will be able to explore 19 “major worlds” on launch. Bioware plan to add many more after that.

Whoever interviewed them seems to take it out of context, and make it seem like you'll have the entire planet surface to explore. Instead, it will just be instances that are on those worlds. Some of them may have sizable areas to explore openly, but most will probably just be small areas that you get sent to for missions and the like. I would love to see them pull it off and actually support 19 planet sized game-areas, because that would be a huge leap forward in gaming. Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that they have the hardware capable of keeping something like that even remotely stable.

I did kind of get that instanced vibe and not an actual planet sized type of play. Which is still pretty cool, having 19 dungeon-like instances puts them on par with World of Warcraft Classic, which also had 19 instances in total pre-TBC. I am still on the fence about this, but then again I think my days of major MMORPGs are over. I don't know if I'll have the time or money to invest anymore than I have already with WoW. (Which is still very expensive) Even though I only log into it to PvP nowadays, I'm nowhere near having the feeling of getting my money's worth.

I did kind of get that instanced vibe and not an actual planet sized type of play. Which is still pretty cool, having 19 dungeon-like instances puts them on par with World of Warcraft Classic, which also had 19 instances in total pre-TBC. I am still on the fence about this, but then again I think my days of major MMORPGs are over. I don't know if I'll have the time or money to invest anymore than I have already with WoW. (Which is still very expensive) Even though I only log into it to PvP nowadays, I'm nowhere near having the feeling of getting my money's worth.

I know what you mean. MMOs these days just lack that "epic" feeling from older ones since so many of them now are just pushing out the same thing as the next one. I still remember my first MMO, Asheron's Call 2: Dark Majesty. I can't recall a single area of the game that was instanced, and the world was still relatively large. Going to the 'underground markets' you would see tons of other players gathered around buying and selling things. Guilds/Clans could rent enormous mansions to get together at, and dungeons were open to everyone at any time.

Now, to get in the same dungeon as someone else in modern MMOs, you need to be in a party with them before you go in or hope you get lucky and get placed in the same one together. Then there's the whole "waiting for queue" issue with some new MMOs, where you have to queue up and can only enter if you have a certain number, otherwise you get locked in the queue waiting. What happened to being able to try and ninja your way through a dungeon, giving yourself a challenge by trying to complete something on your own where parties of others have failed?

The days of quality MMOs have been over for a while now. All developers are concerned with is getting the most $$$ in the shortest amount of time.

@Reaps - Queuing I'll explain from WoW's perspective. Right now it's boiling down to this: If you're a DPS, you have a 10-120 minute wait. If you're a healer or a tank, you have a whole 2 sec-1 minute wait and half the time you'll get the one instance that everyone hates and the group breaks up. It's so stupid the way they have it set and it really takes away from that genuine experience of sitting in Org or Stormwind and finding people in General or LFG. You would have had to run wherever you wanted to go, and now you just get ported in. I hate it, but I sort of enjoy it on a lazy day.

@Reaps - Queuing I'll explain from WoW's perspective. Right now it's boiling down to this: If you're a DPS, you have a 10-120 minute wait. If you're a healer or a tank, you have a whole 2 sec-1 minute wait and half the time you'll get the one instance that everyone hates and the group breaks up. It's so stupid the way they have it set and it really takes away from that genuine experience of sitting in Org or Stormwind and finding people in General or LFG. You would have had to run wherever you wanted to go, and now you just get ported in. I hate it, but I sort of enjoy it on a lazy day.

I guess I'm just too used to being a long-time gamer, and forget that people are extremely lazy when it comes to games now. I remember the times in games like AC2 and Lineage 2 where I'd be running through a dungeon while trying to work on a quest or get some levels, and end up running into other people and starting a party together. Now games cater too much to the "I don't want to work so do it for me" crowd, so you have things like instant teleports from cities to the dungeons, or making it so things that used to be 1:1000000 drop rate from the highest tier dungeon bosses can just be bought from some NPC.

When my internet was not hooked up yet after I moved here, I ended up replaying a lot of my old games from back in the 90's and "pre-WoW" times. One thing I noticed right away was how much more challenging and addictive they were compared to most modern day games. It's been a long time since a new game has given me any real challenge, and I'm afraid that it's going to end up being that way for a long time since developers design their product to the people who want things right away. I hate saying it, but I blame the internet and how easy it is to get things now without really trying. People are too used to getting things right away, so if they find they need to work too much for something in a game, they don't stick with it for long. Developers realize this, so they dumb down and "pre-nerf" their games to make it easy on people.

Whoever interviewed them seems to take it out of context, and make it seem like you'll have the entire planet surface to explore. Instead, it will just be instances that are on those worlds. Some of them may have sizable areas to explore openly, but most will probably just be small areas that you get sent to for missions and the like. I would love to see them pull it off and actually support 19 planet sized game-areas, because that would be a huge leap forward in gaming. Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that they have the hardware capable of keeping something like that even remotely stable.

If it's EA, don't expect the price to drop for another two to three years.

They plan on having 500 planets by 2025... Read the info they got on the game, quite incredible. And yep its open-world!

It would be nice if they did have all 19 major worlds able to explore fully. But I have watched some beta leaks and found that there are certain areas that you go into for quests that are instanced so you don't run into any other players and ruin your experience. Although if your also partied up with other players they too could enter the quest area and help you out.